Chile's Ministry of Finance announced that the Chamber of Deputies approved and sent to a third legislative stage a bill to create an Economic Intelligence and Analysis System against crime, designed to strengthen the tracing of illicit money and the early detection of suspicious economic activity. A central feature of the approved text is to allow the Financial Analysis Unit (UAF) to request the lifting of bank secrecy through an administrative process in three explicitly defined situations. The System would bring together the UAF, the Internal Revenue Service (SII) and the National Customs Service (SNA), enabling information exchange and requests for records between them and other public bodies, supported by specialised units in SII and SNA and an increase of five staff positions in each of those services. Administrative lifting of bank secrecy by the UAF would be limited to cases where a Suspicious Operation Report (ROS) comes from a bank, concerns a public official, or concerns a legal entity; other cases would continue to require judicial authorisation, including the possibility of a single request covering multiple persons involved in the same suspicious operation and access to confidential information via the Santiago Court of Appeals. The framework would also require aggregated public reporting on the use of bank-secrecy lifting powers (administrative and judicial) and transmission of related background to the Chamber, alongside stricter secrecy obligations for UAF staff, with breaches sanctioned up to dismissal. Beyond the System’s governance and counterintelligence arrangements, the bill also updates UAF fine proportionality criteria, gives the SII powers to defer, revoke or restrict tax-document authorisations where there are indications of use in organised-crime offences, adjusts the General Treasury’s powers to seek information and suspend suspicious transactions in specified fraud scenarios, tightens suitability requirements for controllers and senior management of banks and other entities supervised by the Financial Market Commission (CMF) including a prohibition on acquiring or holding 10% or more ownership in defined cases, and creates an undercover “test client” function within the CMF whose reports could be used as evidence in sanctioning proceedings while keeping the official’s identity confidential.

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